


Performance of a Lifetime

by SinMachine420



Series: The Lazaret [2]
Category: The Arcana (Visual Novel)
Genre: Body Horror, Book XIII: Death (The Arcana) Spoilers, Canonical Character Death, Mild Gore, Non-Consensual Touching, Not Canon Compliant, Plague, The Lazaret (The Arcana), This is Bad, almost a slave but not quite, asra who? never heard of him, but not really, hey gang, im sorry, implied death absolutely everywhere, lots of death, lucio is the worst, mildly, this apprentice has a different backstory than the few bits of established information, whats a julian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-10
Updated: 2019-04-10
Packaged: 2020-01-10 21:38:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18416351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SinMachine420/pseuds/SinMachine420
Summary: Elias is an entertainer under the permanent employ of Count Lucio. Even on his deathbed the tyrant demands a show.





	Performance of a Lifetime

**Author's Note:**

> This is. Rough! But I had to write something about my apprentices actually y'know. Dying. This is Elias, next up will be Emjet.
> 
> Elias has a rough go of things. Everything sucks. What are friends.

The streets were becoming crowded with decay, all the way from the dregs to the edge of the palace itself. The only place left that didn’t smell like death was inside those pristine walls, yet even there sometimes Elias swore the miasmas were seeping up from the dungeons below his feet. He was spending more and more time around the expansive halls; plague or no, the Count demanded some semblance of normalcy, demanded to still feel like he was above the rest of Vesuvia. He may be dying like the rest of them, but at least  _ he _ still had rich foods to eat and soft silks to die on. Lucky him.

It’s in the Count’s bedchambers where he is now seated, at the beck and call of a violent man. Elias isn’t even sure if he’s here to perform. He has only so far got the impression that the Count just wants him there to remind himself that he has control of someone else’s life, if not his own.

A broken whine pulls Elias out of his thoughts, drawing his attention back to the beloved Count, the wonderful ruler who dies in pain. 

“Elias, why don’t you fix me,” his voice carries a bite much weaker than it used to but with just as much arrogance.

Elias barely stifles a sigh and folds his hands on his lap, “My Lord you know my specialties lie in Illusory magic, there is nothing I can offer towards a cure-” he’s already waving him off in a silent dismissal, cutting Elias off when his answer isn’t immediately what he wants to hear.

The two sit in relative silence for another moment, the only sound being the labored breathing from the large four poster bed when the Count speaks again, with a curious hesitancy to his words.

“Can you make me look fixed?”

Elias is startled by the smallness of his tone, completely out of character in it’s vulnerability. The Count’s room is decorated with many mirrors, from all angles so that the once lively man could properly enjoy his own appearance. It was to one of those mirrors the Elias now found the Count staring, disgusted with his own face. It’s… pitiful.

“I… Can, but it would only be temporary, and I’m afraid you wouldn’t feel any different.”

“If you can then do it. Looking at the monster in the mirror is only going to kill me faster,” he snaps. Elias considers making him look worse, like a living skeleton, all skin and bone, not even a single strand of golden hair. But Elias still values keeping his neck, so he moves to sit on the bed at the Count’s side, gingerly placing his fingertips along his jawline.

It doesn’t  _ have _ to be hands on, but he wants to make sure his face is in its proper place. Just winging it could misplace it, or get the proportions wrong. So he traces around the Count’s face, over too-prominent cheekbones and sunken sockets, the blood red eyes watching him intently throughout the process. Eventually healthy looking skin begins to build up, bringing vital color back into his cheeks and shine back into his hair. His eyes look about as cold as they once did, all silver and hate. As soon as Elias removes his hands from his face he’s pushed to the side so that the Count can look back into that first mirror, running his own hands, one as artificial as his face, over the new skin there.

Elias is proud of his work. The bastard looks as much the living embodiment of shit as he used to, if you ignored the way his shirt hangs on his frame. The Count… He can’t tell if the Count is as pleased. His eyebrows are pinched in absurd concentration as he examines himself, as if looking for any flaw in the design. It isn’t until he gives a wicked grin that Elias feels himself relax.

“Spend a lot of time looking at my face, Elias? You must have to get the details you did,  _ including _ the aging under my eyes, which frankly, I don’t appreciate.”

Despite critiquing the work, it’s still a backwards way of saying ‘good job’ and so it’s enough to not be executed. He smiles and allows the banter to flow like it used to, “Well my Lord they aren’t as pronounced as they used to be. You actually look a  _ lot _ older.”

The Count’s scowl returns, but there is no real menace behind it. He continues to admire himself for a few more minutes, and Elias begins to think he’d spend the rest of the day like that, fawning over himself, until his eyes are suddenly back on him.

“Elias you’re good at this.”

“What do you want.”

He scoffs, shifting up to a proper sitting position, “Can’t I say something nice without having an ulterior motive?”

“No.”

“Fair enough. Elias can you make yourself look sick?”

Elias would never admit that his blood ran cold just then, his face losing a bit of its color. After watching the Count shrivel away for the past few months he could certainly imagine it, but the idea…

“My Lord, I--”

“For fucks sake Elias use my name. And I just saw what you could do to me, surely you can do it backwards on yourself.”

“My Lo- Lucio, sir, I am an  _ entertainer _ , I don’t see what would be entertaining about looking at a corpse.”

Lucio’s scowl is back with a vengeance, only this time a very real threat lurks beneath it, “Was that what I was?  _ Am? _ Are you calling your  _ Lord _ a corpse, Elias?”

“No! No, not at all Lucio I just-”

The illusion begins to crack as Lucio’s temper begins to rise and Elias’ confidence begins to falter, “Then perhaps an idiot, someone who can’t decide for  _ himself _ what he’d find entertaining!”

“My Lord, please-”

“USE MY FUCKING NAME,” Lucio is up in an instant standing in front of Elias with his jaw trapped in the vice like grip of his prosthetic. It’s quite incredible; no matter how far the plague spreads within him he can still muster the energy to kill when someone pisses him off enough. 

Elias can’t speak, not in defiance or to plead forgiveness because it feels like his tongue is dead weight in his mouth as he struggles against the grip. No one is truly safe from Lucio’s wrath but Elias had become complacent, having been in his good graces for so many years now. As the grip tightens on his jaw he can feel the bone begin to creak and he realizes he may have wasted all of that time in an instant.

Lucio leans forward until he’s almost nose to nose with Elias, new skin peeling away to reveal what was hiding beneath it and his breath is like the grave, “Every move you make is  _ mine _ , every action, every word, every waking  _ moment _ belongs to  _ me _ , and yet you try to tell me no?”

He touches his own face with his free hand, pulling it away with disgust as he’s faced with his own inevitability, “You could’ve made it easy for yourself, Elias, over and done with. But no, you can’t ever let things be easy can you. You always have to make things harder.”

Not another word and then suddenly Lucio was pushing his lips against Elias’, shoving his tongue down the entertainer’s throat. He can’t even pull away from the onslaught; whoever enchanted his arm decided to make the bastard unstoppable, apparently. What he  _ can  _ do is cry, and despite himself that’s what he does, tears running down his face as he shuts his eyes against the world.

When Lucio finally pulls away Elias is gasping for breath, his own panic having robbed him of air at the start. Lucio then flops back down onto the bed, tucking himself back under the covers. His face is as diseased as it was when the day began, but that fire is back in his eyes that he only gets when he irrevocably ruins someone’s life.

The grin he shoots Elias is nothing short of lecherous when he says, “I hope it kills you slowly,” before rolling away from him to sleep.

* * *

Three days after that visit to Lucio Elias develops a cough. He tries to convince himself it’s nothing serious. Everyone coughs sometimes. Sometimes there’s blood in the phlegm but that doesn’t mean anything. He continues to perform when he’s hired. Why would he not?

After a week he finds difficulty holding food down. Every night he wakes up to lose his last meal. Sometimes he makes it to the bathroom first. Usually he doesn’t. 

When the vessels in his eyes first begin to burst he can’t lie to himself anymore. Not when the truth stares at him in the mirror every time he looks. But he lies anyway. He continues to perform. Dances, illusions, anything. Even when his legs stumble beneath him and he can’t find his breath he continues. Even when people stop paying him and stop asking him to he still goes to the doors of those regular customers, pushing his way past frightened nobles into their clean homes with their clean clothes to entertain because that’s all he knows how to do.

Even when he’s dragged from the manor of a family he’s performed for for years. He’d only been there a couple days, and he was just performing. That wasn’t a crime. And their little girl was only vomiting, that doesn’t mean anything. He performs little illusions for the masked doctors that drag him down the streets, glowing butterflies flitting about the beaked noses.

By the time he’s been shunted onto the Lazaret, sat against one of many walls in one of many buildings lit by one of many furnaces, he’s only performing illusions for himself.

* * *

The air is hot and heavy against skin that feels separate from his body, like ill-fitting clothes. His lips are cracked and painful but they don’t bleed anymore. He can feel the blood beginning to settle lower in his body, as if already preparing for when his heart doesn’t need it.

He can’t move himself anymore, his head leans back against the red brick and his arms lie slumped across his midsection, and though his eyes are open he can’t see more than a foot ahead. Is it smoke or just him? He huffs as deep a breath as he could muster, a small cloud of blue flowers fluttering out with the air. His lips curl into a little smile and it hurts but he does it anyway because he can still do it, still perform and entertain.

Then he’s being moved. Not gracefully either. Paralyzed or not he still doesn’t appreciate being manhandled. A hand, maybe two, wrapped around his ankle and pulling him. His back begins to slump and his head cracks against the ground, and for a few terrible seconds his vision goes completely black. When it slowly comes back it looks like the room is a bit brighter, he can see it’s two figures at his legs, both dressed in white. Surrounding him are the hunched forms of other people, sick and dying. Why is he here? This isn’t healthy, someone could get infected.  _ He _ could get infected, and that just wouldn’t do. He tries to voice his complaints but all that comes out is a cracked groan, painful against his throat. 

He understands once he’s lifted and placed onto a cold hard surface, his head thudding painfully. This is a performance of course, some sort of tragic drama to pull at the heartstrings, force the viewers to consider their own mortality. A laugh that sounds like a serrated blade dragging across rotten wood bubbles from his chest as he reaches to touch one of the masked figures before they flinch away.

“ _ H-hey. Wanna-ah s-see~ a tr-tr-tr-ick~ hhh _ ” his words are gasped and spaced, as if he was almost drowned, or maybe was just sobbing. It’s a good effect for the show. The masked figure looks on at him, their impression hidden behind red glass eyes. They’re smiling though, of course they are, who wouldn’t? It’s the little girl behind that mask, obviously. The one he performed for at her first birthday, and then every birthday since. He remembers… she was sick just a little while ago. But obviously she’s better now, she wants to see his trick

The second masked figure, oh it’s the Count behind this mask, wonderful, Lucio always liked his tricks. The masked Lucio grips the edge of the slab he lies on and begins to push it away from himself, towards something that Elias can’t see, perhaps the grand finale. He has time though, he has time to do his trick.

He lifts his hands, or, no he just lifts one finger it seems, but that’s alright, he lifts his finger and taps it down, transforming the slab into a bed of silk and roses. Except… No that didn’t quite work. He must be tired. It  _ is _ so warm in here. Instead of a bed all that appears is a single white rose, wilted and dry against his hand. 

Lucio and the little girl continue to push him away, they must not have liked his trick, he failed them, he failed them  _ again and again he can’t do it right he’s sorry he can’t _ and then the warmth behind him is too much it’s far too much and then suddenly he drops, off of the slab and into something so much worse because it’s so  _ hot _ and there’s fire everywhere around him, on him, he’s being punished because he failed and all he knows how to do is fail and he  _ screams _ for forgiveness that doesn’t come as he bones become brittle and collapse before finally, blissfully, he dies.

**Author's Note:**

> :)


End file.
